' 
County sewage into water so clean it's almost
distilled. "It's OK," Deshmukh reassures me,
casually taking a slug from his own cup. "It's the
same technology they use on the space station."
A er spending the past century building one
of the most elaborate water-delivery systems on
the planet, replete with giant pumps and thou-
sands of miles of pipes and canals, California
has come to this---akin to the last desperate act
of lifeboat-bound sailors drinking their own
bodily uids. e reasons are multiple and com-
plex, but the bottom line is that the state's world-
renowned plumbing is now perilously stressed.
A three-year drought has drained most of the
state's major reservoirs to their lowest levels in
nearly two decades, forcing mandatory water
restrictions for many residents. And warm-
ing temperatures have been shrinking the all-
important snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, the
largest storehouse of surface water in the state.
e biggest and weakest link in the system
is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a former
700,000-acre marsh that has been drained,
diked into islands, and farmed for more than
a century. Much of the land has subsided, and
many islands now sit more than 20 feet below
sea level, creating California's own little slice of
Holland in the middle of the Central Valley.
e delta is also the state's hydraulic heart.
Water ows in through two great arteries: the
Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Much of
it is then pumped south via two massive, man-
made rivers---the Central Valley Project and
the California Aqueduct---and therein lies the
problem. Sea level rise combined with more
severe storms now threaten to topple the weaker
levees and ood the lowest islands, inundating
farmland and poisoning the big delta pumps
with salt water from San Francisco Bay. A major
earthquake---already overdue in the area---
could take out hundreds of miles of levees in
seconds, slashing water supplies for two-thirds
of Californians. Experts say it could take years
to put California's Humpty Dumpty hydraulics
back together again.
More immediately, water exports from the
delta have been partly to blame for crashing
populations of protected chinook salmon and
tiny delta smelt, forcing court-ordered cutbacks
on water deliveries and leaving some Central
Valley farms high and dry. In large protests and
in lawsuits, farmers are demanding that they be
given precedence over the sh. All the while the
population of southern California continues to
increase by more than 200,000 each year.
" e way the system works now is a disaster,"
says Lester Snow, California's secretary of natural
resources. " e majority of water for the state's
economy is coming out of critical habitat for
endangered species. Every year there are more
restrictions on that water."
e Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has be-
come such a bottleneck that last fall Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California
legislature hammered out the most sweeping
overhaul of the state's aging water infrastructure
in nearly half a century. e suite of new laws
mandates water conservation and attempts to
restore the delta ecosystem and secure reliable
water supplies for the state's growing popula-
tion. It also resurrects a proposal that's been
controversial for 30 years---a giant, ten-billion-
dollar ditch known as the Peripheral Canal that
would bypass the delta altogether. For decades,
BY JOEL K. BOURNE, JR.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY EDWARD BURTYNSKY
O n a blistering day in the megalopolis that is southern California,
Shivaji Deshmukh of the Orange County Water District o ers me
a cup of cool, clear water that just yesterday was swirling around in
an Anaheim toilet bowl. We're standing outside the second largest
water-reclamation facility in the world, a high-tech assemblage of micro-filters,
membranes, and UV lights that every day recycles 70 million gallons of Orange